Patrick T - Blue (Metallurgist)

[Mike Senior]

on another matter, Mike states in the MDL's page introduction, that:

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"All these files are presented......without any effects or processing."
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that's clearly NOT the case with your multi-track. it's been tampered with subsequent to the recordings...you've EQ'd, compressed and automated. the vocal has also been pitch corrected.

if i'm going to mix something, i want to apply my own parameters without having them, and their artifacts(!) forced upon me, and i'd suggest that people here in the forum, would also benefit from not having to negotiate material that's been tampered with. for example, automation is going to mess up someone's Insert chain, and thereafter through to the stereo buss, pretty substantially. if they don't yet understand what they are being confronted with in the supplied materials, they will never stand a hope in learning anything. they believe they are mixing "The Recordings", without processing - Mike has told them so.

if the kid can't pitch and you don't want the world to know, i could understand processing it before releasing it in the Public Domain (but poor pitching skills will show up at gigs anyway). personally, i think it would provide excellent opportunity in the forum for people to have a go at doing "transparent" pitch correction, for example. and if low cuts and high cuts or shelving filters need to be applied, that they learn by having a go at doing this themselves. the same goes for compression...and automation.

Wanted to respond to this specific point too. That rubric on the library listings page is indicating that I've not personally processed the multitrack files in any way, and that those are the files the artist delivered to me, as they would to a mix engineer. I can see, however, that you might feel the wording is misleading, so I will see if I can reword it accordingly.

The wider issue of what processing should or shouldn't be applied before submitting tracks for mixing, however, is very much a grey area. For example, I have frequently had people berating me for saying that it's a mix engineer's job to pitch-correct a vocal if the mix engineer feels it will improve the end result -- along the lines of 'if that's how it was delivered, then that's how the artist wants it, and it's not my job to bail them out there'. So I can't please everyone on this. Suffice to say that there are plenty of productions in the library without pitch-corrected vocals, as well as some with problematic pitch-correction, and some with all-but-transparent pitch correction, and there's something to be learned from all of them.

Clearly, in those cases where processing has been applied in less-than-ideal ways, that can cause mix problems, but I'm not going to bar those productions from the library if I still think the production is fundamentally mixable. If I did, then I might just as well eliminate at least a dozen projects where the snare mic was placed unusably close, so it just goes 'donk'! Each multitrack project in the library provides its own challenges, and many of them aren't ideal recordings or productions in many ways, but that doesn't take away from their educational value. The bottom line is that I've received plenty of multitrack productions to mix professionally with recording and production problems, and it's been my job to solve them -- if I want the work! On that basis, I would actually say it's a disservice to students to present them only with totally clean, pristine recordings of the highest quality, because real-world multitracks regularly present greater challenges.

I agree it would be great to provide a full written description of the exact nature of the multitrack files to make this clearer for people, and this was something I used to do as a matter of course in the library's infancy -- here, for example. This did, however, take a lot of my time, and I simply wasn't able to continue doing it on a regular basis. If you (or indeed anyone else) would like to provide this service to the community, then by all means send me those write-ups and I'll be happy to make them into sticky 'About This Multitrack' posts for the benefit of all users.